public sword-presentation of the military commander. Which being so, and it being evidently the intention of the Divine Spirit to mark as distinctively as before the parties intended by the black horse's rider, let me beg the reader to observe with what beautiful propriety they have been all substantially interwoven with the imagery of the hieroglyphic before us. The balance was that which might appropriately be held in the hand of the rider. There therefore it was figured. For the curule chair, his very position as a rider, being indicative of authority and rule over the Roman people, was itself a substitute. And with respect to the wheat and barley, and the Roman measure also forasmuch as the simplicity of the hieroglyphic, which might only consist of a horse and its rider, could not admit of their visible delineation, the defect was supplied by that audible mention of them, on which we have just been commenting, in the voice from the midst of the living creatures.

We have seen what were the professions of equity, with the governors. But they were professions, from the time prefigured in the vision, almost always falsified: and the injunctions of the law to equity, however solemn, for the most part altogether in vain. "Those," says Gibbon, (iii. 87,) "who had learning enough to read the orations of Cicero against Verres, might instruct themselves in all the various arts of oppression, with regard to the weight, the price, the quality, and the carriage;1 and the avarice of an unlettered governor would supply the ignorance of precept or precedent."-In the which we have the solution of the enigma that at first sight appeared so inexplicable; how, under the influences of one that held the balance of equity as his badge, the aspect of the Roman horse did yet gather blackness. For it was but in profession that he held the balance of equity. The reality of the case with him, as with Ephraim, was that de

where more was required: which combined indications meet in the Præsides Provinciarum, completely and alone.

It may illustrate the subject of the Seal, as well as Gibbon's language here quoted, if we observe that in Sicily, when the wheat-procurations were required from the islanders, the market-price being not above one denarius the modius, Verres exacted three denarii from some of them as a money equivalent for each modius due. Cicero in Frument. Verr.

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scribed by the prophet, "The balance of deceit is in his hands; he loveth to oppress." The taxes, oppressive as they were in themselves after Caracalla's aggravating edict, were felt much more so from the iniquity of the local administration: and as to the laws against extortion and injustice, like many others which meet the eye in history, they must be looked on rather as records of the crime, than preventatives of its commission.

And thus we see how the voice from the midst of the living creatures bore, like all else, with perfect unity of effect, on the main point intended in the vision. It signified an æra in which justice itself would raise its voice in vain for the oppressed; the black colour of the horse indicating its ineffectiveness. The æra of Alexander Severus, the same that was selected by Gibbon for his painting on the subject, answers exactly in this point. His was the last great struggle of equity against corruption in the Roman empire: and he made it in the spirit of one who had studied and loved the golden precept of Christianity,-Do as ye would be done by ! 2 But as we have seen, it was an unavailing struggle; and his attempt at a reform only served to inflame the evil it was meant to cure.

It is possible that the topic may at first sight appear to some persons as of insufficient importance to form the subject of one of these sacred prefigurative sketches. If so, let me say, in conclusion, that the objector will meet with no sympathy from any whose authority is of weight on the subject, either amongst the ancients or the moderns. The recorded opinion of the most sagacious of emperors, philosophers, and historians, is united to mark the gravity of the evil. More especially I would

3

1 Hosea xii. 7.-The old Apocalyptic Expositor Tichonius, in his 6th Homily on the Revelations, expresses very much the same view of the symbol on this head. "Habebat stateram in manu, libram,-id est examen æquitatis: quia, dum fingit se justitiam tenere, per simulationem lædit." And so too Primasius. 2 Leges de jure populi et fisci," says Lampridius of him, (Ch. xvi.) "moderatas et infinitas sanxit: " and in Ch. xlii; " Præsides provinciarum, si male [egissent,] in quadruplum reddituri, præter condemnationem aut peculatus aut repetundarum." His admiration of Christian morality is well known; and will be noted by me again under the fifth Seal.

3 I may instance among the ancients Cicero and Trajan.—Of the former the Verreian orations give a lively picture of the misery resulting in a particular province through fiscal oppressions of this kind; at a time when taxation was less oppressive, and the Prætors as a body less corrupt, than afterwards.

again direct his attention to the manner in which the philosophic historian of the Decline and Fall, in his digression on the subject, just as in that on the Prætorian usurpations previous, seeks to impress on the reader's mind its important bearing on the decline of the Roman empire. "The personal character of the emperors," he says, "their victories, laws, follies, and fortunes, can interest us no further than as they are connected with the general history of the decline and fall of the monarchy. It is our attention to that great subject, that will not suffer us to overlook the important edict of Caracalla;" that is, in reference to its oppressive bearing, through the consequent aggravation of taxation, on the most vital interests of the empire. In fact the decisive testimony of history is unequivocal as to the distress that, not immediately alone, but lastingly and increasingly, resulted from it. The agriculture of the provinces was insensibly ruined. Preparation was made for famine; which, as we shall see under the next Seal, soon succeeded: and, in its ultimate consequences, it involved not the mere territorial desolation of provinces, once the most fertile in the empire, but personal and family distress also, such as to drive parents in numbers to infanticide: indeed to an extent so unprecedented and alarming as to force the notice. of the legislature; of which a remedial law of Constantine remains the remarkable and authentic monument.?

Trajan was wont to liken inordinate taxation, in its effects on the body politic, to the enlargement of the spleen, which in the natural body causes atrophy. "Exactiones improbans et detestans, fiscum lienem vocabat, quòd eo crescente artus reliqui tabescunt." Hence his jealous watchfulness against it. See the younger Victor, Epit. p. 150.

In Justinian's time Procopius speaks of the taxation as a devouring pestilence on the inhabitants.

This will suffice for the ancients. As regards the moderns I will only further exemplify in Mosheim. In his Church History he has one short chapter on the incommoda of the Roman empire; and in it makes the evil treated of under this Seal the most prominent subject of the chapter. Part i. ch. i. § 2.

1 Quoted more fully p. 158 Note, suprà.-Murphy, the translator of Tacitus, speaks in the same manner of "the rapacity of the Imperial Procurators, as among the causes that finally wrought the downfall of the Empire." Ad. Tac. Agric. § 34 and referring to Tac. Annal. xii. 60.

2 In speaking of a humane law of Constantine, made early in his reign with a view to remedy the evil, Gibbon observes as follows. "The horrid practice of exposing and murdering their new-born infants was become every day more frequent in the provinces, and especially in Italy. It was the effect of distress : and the distress was principally occasioned by the intolerable burden of taxes, and by the vexations as well as cruel persecutions of the officers of the revenue

Thus by any one that considers the end from the beginning, this æra of Caracalla cannot but be regarded in the same light in which it has been delineated by the historian, as one of the introduction of fresh and grievous morbific principle into the Roman body politic, under which it would indeed gather blackness.-And who then can doubt but that it was a subject deserving of prefiguration? Or who, that it was the very subject prefigured under the Seal before us? For surely I may say, not a particular is there in the emblematic vision that has not been shown to have had its correspondency in the features, as noticed by me, of this period of Roman history. In truth, brief as is the description of the vision in the text, the whole subject of this long chapter seems to pass embodied before us, as we once again read it: "When he opened the third Seal, I beheld, and lo! a black horse ; and he that sat on it having a pair of balances in his hand! And I heard a voice in the midst of the living creatures saying, "A chanix of wheat for a denarius, and three chanixes of barley for a denarius; and see that thou wrong not in regard to the oil and wine!"

CHAPTER IV.

THE FOURTH SEAL.

'AND when he had opened the fourth Seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, Come and see! against their insolvent debtors. The less opulent or less industrious, instead of rejoicing in an increase of family, deemed it an act of paternal tenderness to release their children from the miseries of a life which they were themselves unable to support. The humanity of Constantine, moved perhaps by some recent and extraordinary instances of despair, engaged him to address an edict to all the cities of Italy and afterwards of Africa, directing instant relief to those parents who should produce before the magistrates the children whom their own poverty would not allow them to educate." Vol. ii. 250.

As regards the territorial desolation resulting, he speaks in another volume, iii. 87. He states that in sixty years after the death of Constantine, and before a barbarian had been seen in Italy, an exemption from taxes was granted for 330,000 acres in the fertile province of Campania, that is for one eighth part of the whole province, as being by actual survey ascertained to be desert; and he ascribes it to the long impoverishing effect of fiscal oppressions, of the origin of which this hieroglyphic marks a chief æra.-It will be remembered that Italy was reduced by Galerius, before the end of the third century, to a level in respect of taxation with the other provinces.

And I looked, and behold a pale1 horse! And his name that sat on it was Death: and Hades followed after him. And power was given to him to kill on the fourth part of the earth with the sword,-and with famine, and with pestilence, and with wild beasts of the earth."

There is no research here needed to explain the meaning of the symbol. The rider was not, as before, the representative of human functionaries and rulers, the permitted agencies for good or evil in the empire,-each characterized by their distinctive emblems, which, though well understood at the time, might now require investigation to unfold them. It was a symbol of meaning as obvious to the reader now, as it could have been then to the seer. For who it meant is expressly told us. It was the personification of Death! To mark that it was the actual king of terrors, and not, as otherwise it might possibly have been construed, the destroyer merely of political existence, —his badge, if I may so say, was Hades, or the grave, following him, the recipient with its opening jaws of the victims slain by Death. The commission was given him, by the supreme arbiter of life and death, to kill upon the Roman earth with all the four sore judgments of God;with the sword, and with famine, and with pestilence, and with the wild beasts of the earth and the horse, symbolizing the Roman people, appeared deadly pale and livid under his influences; a hue symptomatic of approaching dissolution.

An æra of terrible mortality, and to an extent scarce 1 XAwpos first, grassy green; also pale; combining the two, livid. Its application to death in either of the latter senses is obvious and frequent. So "Pallida mors; "Horace. Compare xλwpov deos, Homer. In these and such like examples the epithet of the effect is, by a metathesis, applied to the causal agent. In the text it is applied more appropriately to the party affected. So the emperor Constantius, father to Constantine, was called Chlorus from his paleness.

Hippocrates, in his 2nd Book on Prognostics, enumerates among the symptoms of approaching death, the colour of the facial skin becoming thus green and black; το χρώμα του ξύμπαντος προσωπου χλωροντε και μελαν εον.

2 So lavatos ought here to be rendered, as most commentators observe. Its use in this sense is borrowed from the Septuagint; which thus, in near thirty places, renders the Hebrew, a word translated in our English version, and without doubt correctly, pestilence. So 2 Sam. xxiv. 13, 15; "Or shall it be three days' pestilence?" where the Septuagint translates it @avaTos.- Other differences of translation from the received version will be noticed afterwards. 3 So Isa. v. 14; "Therefore hell (rather hades) hath enlarged herself and opened her mouth without measure; and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, shall descend into it."